A Silence Fell Across the Globe PH2018

The morning was brilliant with hardly a cloud in the air. It was a brisk fall day but after the scorching summer it was a relief to
feel almost a cold breeze press through the cotton shirt. Another race to work won by rats with one stop at a coffee shop for a shot of Joe;
Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

A sift through emails, the day’s schedule, a chat around the water cooler about the weekend’s sporting events, gave a sense of accomplishment
without actually doing anything which was just like a typical day should be. The break room fridge was being cleaned in the afternoon and the company
cooler was down in the storage room. “Any volunteers to fetch the cooler?”

While looking for a light switch, there was a feeling in the air of something being off.

Had it gotten colder and darker when They arrived? I can’t recall...

A news flash was up on the TV in the breakroom of Dallas going, “Black as night,” then all communication with the city was lost.
First it was one city, then another reporting the same thing, then states and countries all reporting a “blackness” covering the sky. Even the
space station reportedly said the “stars had gone out,” before contact was lost.

Then a silence fell across the globe.

Standing there, cooler in hand, a small puddle of something black and oozing was heading down the stairs and into the sump drain in front of him.

His breathing pace picked up as he slowly mounted the stairs. The staff jokingly called it “The Fallout Shelter” but that is what it was. Built
during the height of the Cold War for an impending nuclear attack by The Commies, it had been one of the few that had electro-magnetic pulse
protection built in. The exit was shut! And the knob did not turn. “Hey!” he yelled as he pounded on the door. “Very funny! Now let me
out!”

After a short sense of panic he focused his breathing and calmed down to survey his surroundings. The black oozing stuff was not coming from under the
door but from above it. It looked like a forced air heating vent but bigger, Probably for clean air, spoken out loud to no one in particular.
He could make out the lever and the label, “Closed - Open”, and pushed the lever to the left to close it off.

Heading back down the stairs, he found six rooms, one had been furnished with a survival kit and enough food, If that is what you want to call
it, he mused, for so many days for so many people. No privy but one of the kits was stored in an 8-gallon bucket that had a punch out lid with a
flip top on top of that. Water bottles, even some spare water jugs for one of the office’s water cooler. Thank god…, he muttered, when he
found the toilet paper.

Then the lights went out. Sh!t!!! He was in pitch black darkness.

I left my phone at my desk! GAH!, he put his right hand out in front of him until he slowly bumped into the food storage container. ”Hey!
Wasn’t there a flashlight in… F# yeah!” was the exclamation when a beam of light came one.

After a few more minutes, he found the battery power back up for the shelter and turned it on to save the flashlight battery. Having lived through the
forest fires without power for 10 days, he turned off all nonessential items.

Not sure what else to do, he walked back up to the stairs and went back up. The door, no longer powered, opened at first try. He stepped from the
known world into a scene from Hell.

There was nothing there. Not a building, a tree, a vehicle, bird, bug, animal, or human. Just a layer of the black stuff slowly oozing down the
drains. No power lines. No sky scrapers. No airplanes. No noise except the sound of one man screaming.

He looked at a dark cloud moving on the horizon engulfing what could only be a building which promptly melted. Whole cities disappeared far away and
over the hills.

Afraid of being caught and goo-ified, he ran back inside the fallout shelter. He tried to think but could only remember his uneventful day in perfect
memory. What does this? What was that crazy story about the coast of Alaska? I didn’t even say ‘Good-bye’... STOP! Think. and this
went on for some time as the story slowly came back to him.

There was a helicopter flying some scientists around the Arctic Ocean when they passed over some ice that had black splotches on it. They
followed the ice for 15 miles and kept finding black stuff hanging and dripping from the ice. Some of it was retrieved. It was not oil or any
hydrocarbon. It was organic but it was not alive. They found jellyfish and sea gulls wrapped up in the stuff. The gulls were nothing but skeletons.
Nobody knew what the black goo was.

That Mars dust storm that encircled the planet and killed the Opportunity rover! The rover was supposed to be using some kind of quantum
communication so they could edit out pictures of alien tech so the public couldn’t see it. Was it the secret communication tech that drew their
attention to us?

Oh god! The conspiracy theorists said it was alien nano-robots who flew from system to system devouring all life in its path. The main swarm arrived
first. Anything left over was taken by the second wave leaving nothing but a black goo behind.

We did this to ourselves.

Days, weeks passed. Rain came and went washing the goo away. The last man on earth waited for the day when a shadow on the sun would
signal the last human to survive our first alien contact.

A bit of truth goes a long way! The mind making connections is the key. What IF a nano-robot swarm caused the Mars global dust storm? How long
before they got here? What IF you were the last survivor on earth?

Twilight Zone touches here and there. But it is the possibility of being real that is the scary part!

Ever think of a "worst case scenario" to the Fermi Paradox? What if an alien race built a swarm of power hungry nano-robots that not only killed their
creator but figured out it can wait until a certain level of sophistication is reached (quantum technology?) before it was worth their effort to swarm
in and devour everything?

Didn't that goo turn out to be algae? Or that's what "they" said it was! (google says "yup.")

The idea that other species in the universe have logically decided to end all competition for resources in multiple preemptive strikes is ... logical.
And empathy is, as far as we know, restricted to humans.

A little mystery. A little fact. A little CT. A little Twilight Zone-ish. And I managed to not give the main character a name which kind of eats away
at your noodle turning your gray matter to black goo!

It is a bit open ended which all good PH stories have. It is the survival and the small things which remind us all that it is never small!

The two font colors are supposed to indicate the main narrative and the internal thoughts. The thing being, we do not know what order those thoughts
are in! They "fit" with the narrative but may or may not be sequential.

They do do that in this story. The futurists fear we may make our own version of nanobots that turn on us. It is called "ecophagy" where nanorobots go
out of control and eat everything just to make copies of themselves. The black goo is what they do not use.

In this case, alien nanobots lie waiting for a point where technology has evolved enough for them to bother going to gorge and feast on another host
planet. The point, our protagonist thinks, lies with "quantum communication" which is a big secret technology. Once a certain amount of usage happened
it was like sending up a flare announcing "here we are"!

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